Online traffic shifts from PCs

For possibly the first time, the most popular online activities are being carried out on devices other than a PC, a new report has found.

Real-time entertainment services, such as Netflix and YouTube, accounted for 60% of all peak downstream traffic on North American fixed-access Internet networks as of last month, according to Waterloo, Ont.-based Sandvine Corp.’s 10th Global Internet Phenomena Report. Most of that traffic was destined for devices other than a laptop or desktop computer.

“Game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs, tablets and mobile devices being used within the home combine to receive 55% of all real-time entertainment traffic,” reads an excerpt from the report.

“Of course, real-time entertainment’s emergence is not exclusive to fixed-access networks. Within the mobile networks surveyed, real-time entertainment is the largest component of traffic overall, and in Asia-Pacific it is even the largest on the upstream, thanks to peercasting applications like PPStream.” (peercasting refers to a process of sharing multiple live audio and/or video feeds online simultaneously)
The Web-based streaming video service provided by Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix Inc. retained its crown as the dominant user of Internet bandwidth in North America, accounting for 32.7% of peak downstream traffic. That is up from 29.7% when Sandvine released its last global phenomena report in May, which at the time was a 44% increase from last October, when Netflix represented closer to 20% of peak download traffic.

“With so many screens available in a household it is also easy to imagine a situation where multiple streams occur simultaneously, like one individual watching a high-definition Netflix movie on the primary TV while another is flipping through YouTube clips on a tablet,” notes the report.

“This increasing number of concurrent streams has the potential to severely disrupt network capacity planning models and service plan design and price.”

The rapidly increasing use of the Web to watch rich video content, regardless of the device used, represents a formidable challenge for Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world. Many have begun spending billions of dollars upgrading their physical networks to handle the growing bandwidth demands associated with greater online video consumption.

Canadian providers such as BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada unit and Rogers Communications Inc. fought a highly politicized regulatory battle leading up to the last federal election over proposed usage-based billing (UBB) policies for Internet service.

While opponents, including Netflix, criticized such billing for placing arbitrary limits on the amount of data a subscriber could download each month before incurring hefty overage fees, Bell and others have argued UBB is necessary to manage rising issues of network congestion.

“The fact that more video traffic is going to game consoles than PCs should be a wake-up call that counting bytes is no longer sufficient for network planning, as consumer electronics can drive rapid adoption of new services, in some cases literally overnight,” the Sandvine report said.